Thursday, July 29, 2010

7-26-2010 Nerds and Emptiness; a Quest

A significant part of my childhood was spent playing the vidya games. I just dig em. my parents wouldn't buy me any console systems, and we were a Mac family, but just the same I would save funds. Bought myself a gameboy pocket, a nintendo 64. Plenty of others. Getting to the point now, there was one particular game I used to play on my mom's first generation iMac. Its name was Starcraft. Starcraft is one of these games that grabs you by the short 'n curlys and simply won't let go. It has been twelve years since the last Starcraft game was released, yet people kept the old (ancient by video game standards) game alive. This type of behavior is insanely rare in the vidya game community.

Starcraft is special. The developer, Blizzard, finally decided to make a sequel, creatively named Starcraft 2. I pre-ordered it about two months ago, thinking that my new job would certainly supply me with the necessary 55$ I would need to secure the first-Starcraft-game-in-twelve-damn-years. Unfortunately, that job sucked. I do not have anywhere near 55$. But I went to the midnight launch of the game anyway. For the spectacle, and the nerdly dudes.

These shots are from the mall in Roseville where the gamestop is. I had no clue how to get in that late at night, so a bit of an adventure was required. The sensation of walking around an empty center of commerce was bizarre. I walked down some type of promenade surrounded by closed restaurants that were all still playing muzak in their patio seating. In some type of double nerd conundrum, my quest to hang out at a midnight vidya game launch simultaneously reminded me of Romero's Dawn of the Dead.